


go nail and tooth

by beaureqard



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Disordered Eating Habits, Gen, Self-Worth Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-03-31 10:03:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3973972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaureqard/pseuds/beaureqard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Basically, in his childhood, someone controlled Foggy's access to food in a majorly fucked way. And this affects his relationship to food and shit like that."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> prompt from the kinkmeme; http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/1296.html?thread=1424400#cmt1424400  
> all this is just copied straight over from the thread on the kinkmeme as I post, content and author's notes are exactly the same 
> 
> title from "I Go Hungry" by Mother Mother

He doesn’t like to eat in public. He doesn’t like to eat in groups, or around people in general, not even if the people are very nice and very polite, not even if they offer to share with him or order the same things he does. It’s harder to deal with than you’d think, really, especially in a career that is too much about nice suits and nicer dinner parties, in a city where you’re more than halfway expected to buy a hot dog on every street corner. He pleads an empty wallet too often for the excuse to ring true, anymore, but it’s not like he can tell anybody what his real reasons are. He gets very good at putting on a silly face and a silly voice and prattling on about his manly and chivalrous honor when people offer to pay for his meals, if he’s really so broke, and then everyone laughs and everyone forgets and Foggy is the only one not talking through a mouthful of mystery meat as whatever group he’s in makes its way toward whatever destination. With drinking, be it coffee or alcohol, things are somehow easier. It’s all right to sit next to someone and sip at a mug or a glass and he doesn’t really understand it but he certainly appreciates it, because he can’t afford to go his entire life without consuming something in a social setting, not if he wants to have any friends at all. He likes dates at Starbucks and nights at bars and he even likes Jamba Juice, because smoothies are in this weird food-drink limbo that he resolutely does not question, not even a little bit.

If it wasn’t for the whole “societal expectations revolving around communal eating” thing it would maybe even be something of a blessing—it’s certainly one for his wallet, when he saves enough on fancy restaurants to cover the food he actually will eat, when he can call for Chinese takeout (not that he does, not as often as he maybe should) and have it delivered straight to his door with nobody to stare him down and judge, when he can pick up bags of whatever he wants (whatever he wants is something he’s still getting used to, because god, adulthood is weird, so weird that he really hardly ever takes advantage of this apparent freedom) from the grocery store and cook for himself in his own apartment and it’s cheap—but it never quite seems to work out that way. No matter what, Foggy always feels his difference and discomfort like a shroud, like a veil, always feels like he sticks out like a sore and bleeding thumb every time he begs off dinners with friends due to some imaginary prior engagement, every time they know and he knows they know and he knows they aren’t going to ask him but their curiosity is picking at him, stabbing at him, their innocent smiles of acceptance nothing more than bared teeth. Everybody wants to know, he can feel it, he can smell it, and he can’t do a damn thing about it. It’s not like he can just tell someone, hey, I don’t like to eat around people, because all that would do is whet their curiosity and invite questions he doesn’t want to hear and doesn’t want to answer. It’s an impossible position and it sucks and by the end of his law school career the only friends he has are those he sees in class and never wants to talk too long to, just in case talk turns to trying out the new Indian place down the block.

Things are better around Matt, who has figured out his preferences and doesn’t question them, who is all too used to getting questioned, who knows what it’s like and doesn’t want to spread it around. Matt gets it even if he doesn’t know the reasons why, Matt lets him eat where and when he pleases and never asks about getting lunch together and even refuses invitations so Foggy doesn’t have to, usually with some self-deprecating remark about blind people having no use for restaurant décor; Foggy is supremely grateful all the time even if he has no intention of letting Matt know about, well, about things Foggy doesn’t let people know about ever. He almost thinks about eating with Matt, because at least the guy couldn’t stare at him, but he’d probably expect to talk and he’d probably be able to hear Foggy eat with those really weird-good hearing skills of his, and by the time Foggy reaches that train of thought he’s invariably lost his appetite altogether. So they don’t eat around each other, and they don’t talk about not eating around each other, and everything’s great in that department.

When they hire Karen, Foggy lives in quiet terror for weeks that she’ll ask him out to lunch and he’ll have to say no and make up some excuse and she’ll think he doesn’t like her even if he does like her, he really does, but there are things he won’t do, not even for pretty girls. But Karen is too preoccupied with her various and sundry near-death experiences, and when she does want to consume things in Foggy’s vicinity she is all too happy to want alcohol instead of anything else, and Foggy is all too happy to help her out in that particular department. She’s content to want alcohol for the foreseeable future, and this is the kind of arrangement he is perfectly comfortable with, so things are good there too.

He pins his issues down to the social, and ignores the sorry empty state of his fridge and his pantry and his everything else. He doesn’t have a problem, he’s just kind of poor and still new to living on his own and besides, someone with a problem wouldn’t be as _fat_ as he is. He eats when he feels he’s done enough to deserve eating, because food is something that needs justification, and if he ends most days without deserving it then that’s just how things are. He isn’t starving, anyway, he drinks coffee and smoothies and cuts into his emergency hoards of junk food when he can’t think but for the noise of his stomach and he’s just fine, thank you very much.

He’s just _fine_. 

(Author’s Notes: This is, I believe, my first-ever fill (it isn’t complete yet, of course, but still worth mentioning)! I really had no intention of starting something like this, not with finals coming up, but this prompt surprised me with how much I wanted it done to my exact specifications—as such, I realized I had to fill it myself. I cannot guarantee a regular schedule for updating (as mentioned previously, finals!) but I hope as much as you do that I can find it within myself to finish this. If you have any comments, critiques, concerns or suggestions, I’d love to hear them (is that allowed? Can I ask for that?)! I’m thinking about mirroring this with a chapter from Matt’s point of view, before moving on to what might be considered actual action. Any thoughts or advice? I hope I’m doing this right!)


	2. Chapter 2

Matthew Murdock’s roommate—if indeed the individual within his assigned room is in fact his roommate, and not someone else—is hungry. The sick-sounding gurgles emanating from this person’s midsection are audible even before Matt enters the room, and are in fact enough to make him consider not entering the room at all. He considers ding-dong-ditching a pizza or something at the door and coming back once the unknown hungry roommate has eaten their fill, and then decides that Matt Murdock ought to be made of sterner stuff than that. He knocks and enters.

“Excuse me, is this room 312?”

The conversation that follows is awkward but not wholly terrible, as conversations go, even though it’s hard to keep track of what the roommate (Foggy Nelson, he corrects himself, Foggy who seems nice and is taking Punjabi for the sake of a crush and is candid around Matt’s blindness where so many people are stony or embarrassed) is saying over the stomach noises. Matt tries to reason it out, tries to remember if there are any religions with fasting holidays around this time, or maybe Foggy is supposed to have a blood test later in the day? He can smell that Foggy’s eaten within the last three days but there’s too much bombarding his senses in this new place to figure out exactly what; he decides not to worry about it once Foggy suggests they get coffee.

As time goes on, he notices that Foggy suggests that people get coffee with him kind of often. He does it without fail every time he meets someone new, and more often than not when he and Matt have a few hours of free time—the sort of opportunities someone else might take to go to lunch, or at least order something from the Thai place that took the campus by storm last month. Matt doesn’t really know what to do with the observation aside from just going along with it, chalking it up to a rampant caffeine addiction or a fondness for the barista with the long hair and the lilting voice, the one whose shift always sees a lot of crinkly dollar bills stuffed into the tip jar. Eventually, though, Matt thinks he gets to the right answer: Foggy asks people out to coffee for the same reasons Matt offers his hand for people to shake. It’s a preemptive motion, a thing to seem normal on your own terms, it’s social performance on the defensive. He doesn’t know _why_ Foggy does it, of course, and he’s not about to ask, but the comparison seems apt, makes more and more sense as Matt notices the other things Foggy does.

Foggy doesn’t eat—at least, not when Matt’s there, even though he can smell it when Foggy’s eaten (not often enough, it always seems to him, but maybe the guy has a slow metabolism?) after the fact. Foggy doesn’t eat when anyone’s there, it seems, and Matt notices him ducking dinner invitations like they were blows or bullets, his heart always kicking into high gear even though his voice stays perfectly still. The first time it happens Matt’s kind of impressed, suddenly sure that Foggy has chosen exactly the right profession; the other times it happens (and happens and happens and happens) it’s just kind of concerning. 

He asks Foggy to a meal himself exactly once, just to be sure, just to prove that he’s right, to make sure that it’s the meal itself and not the people accompanying it that has Foggy so nervous. It happens only one time, because Foggy’s heart gets so loud at the suggestion that Matt has to leave so he can get any studying done at all. He feels bad, of course, but he also feels glad to be right, and a little curious. He wonders if people feel like this about him, about the questions they have of his blindness, and then he feels so bad for the invasion of privacy that he buys Foggy a Starbucks gift card and never mentions it again. 

Despite the concern and the issues and the whole thing, Matt never says a word, can never find the right way, the right time to say anything. In the end he lets the issue pass by entirely, partly out of courtesy and partly out of fear because he’s never had that many friends or that many roommates, and he never wanted to jeopardize either of those relationships. Not to mention the fact that Matt has more secrets than he knows what to do with, and that he’d have to spill half of them just to explain how he knows that Foggy’s hungry all the time, even though he is, he really is, hungry _all_ the time. After years of knowing him it seems that Foggy Nelson is hungry in the perennial sense, not the temporary: the sense where you’d use _es_ instead of _está_ if you were speaking Spanish, the sense of essence over condition; despite this, despite all of it, Matt says nothing, because while Foggy is hungry he is also Matt’s friend, and he really is pretty much fine. He isn’t like—he isn’t like—Matt sometimes thinks about the skinniest kids in the orphanage, the ones with brittle hair that would keep snapping when they moved, with nails that would creak if you put any pressure on them at all; Foggy isn’t _like_ those kids, Foggy is _fine_. Foggy is warm and he takes up a healthy amount of space, and his hair is long enough to touch his collar, and it never falls apart like it would if there was really a problem. 

He’s surprised when Karen mentions it, nary a week after being hired. She pulls him aside (Matt hates being pulled and especially without warning, thinks that normal blind people probably hate it too, but he decides now is not the time to mention it) and whispers at him, concern thick on her tongue, “Is Foggy okay?”

“I, Karen, I don’t really—what do you mean by that, exactly?” He listens hard at Foggy on the other side of the wall, decides that his lungs are fine and his sinuses are clear so he can’t be sick, his stomach is churning around the coffee Karen made for him, his bones are all in place, decides that nothing seems wrong. 

“Well, I just… Matt, I’ve never seen him eat.” He knows when she looks over her shoulder because of the way her hair brushes her shirt; she must be concerned that Foggy could be listening. “I know you’ve known him longer than I have, so, so I didn’t want to bring it up to him, in case it was… you know, normal? For him?”

“I… Foggy’s fine, you don’t have to worry about him.” Matt is more relieved than anything, glad that he hadn’t missed something obviously wrong with his best friend. He’s also surprised that Karen noticed, wondering just how observant she actually is, realizing that _this_ is how she’s gotten so much information on Union Allied. “He never said as much to me, but I kind of gathered that he likes to eat alone. He’s been like this ever since I’ve known him, so I guess… yeah, it is normal, for him. I wouldn’t bring it up, I don’t think he likes to talk about it.” That’s the understatement of the year, and Matt can only pray that Karen will follow this advice. 

He starts thinking, though, starts wondering again, just how normal it actually is. If Karen, who’s known them barely a month, can notice and point it out to Matt… honestly, why _hasn’t_ he been more concerned? Isn’t Foggy his friend, his best friend? A pit of unease grows in Matt’s stomach, and he resolves to deal with this once things have settled down in Hell’s Kitchen. His city. 

 

(Author’s Notes: This is the longest thing I’ve ever written! It’s longer than the essays I should probably be doing instead of this! I am having so much fun! I’ve never really written dialogue before, so let me know if something seems off. Thank you so much for your comments and suggestions, I plan to incorporate most of them (as I’ve done with OP’s Karen suggestion here) at some point. Next chapter will be Foggy, and more directly tied to the action of the show. Thanks for reading!)


	3. Chapter 3

Foggy has not had the best of weeks. There was that thing, right after Karen’s charges were dropped—that thing when she pulled out some marriage lasagna and the situation which got real weird real quick because, what, was she trying to introduce some kind of romantic tension, or was it really just the best method of payment she could think of? Personally, Foggy would have preferred the cost of the ingredients in cold hard cash rather than hot squishy noodle-cheese-meat-mixture, would have even split it with Matt no matter how paltry the sum, but it’s not like Karen had asked. Foggy had made some excuse, ducked out of the office for a few hours. He’s sure Matt covered for him, and then not sure why he’s sure but entirely unwilling to question it because Matt-related matters (ha, MATTers) are firmly established next to smoothies in the no-question zone. Concerned as he may be, Foggy doesn’t ask Matt why the hell he shows up with an alarming number of scrapes and bruises—likewise, Matt doesn’t ask Foggy why the hell he won’t sit down to a meal. Things work, sort of, in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of way.

So there was the marriage lasagna, and the general stresses of Mrs. Cardenas’ case and the untouchable asshole politicians who were behind the problem, and then Landman and Zack. Then Marci. Marci who he’d really, really liked, Marci who got tired of waiting for him to ask her to a romantic dinner on a proper date, who heard all the excuses and believed none of them but didn’t ever actually _ask_ what Foggy’s problem was. He’s always been grateful to her for that, even if she did decide to market her considerable skills to the soul-sucking, heartless, bottom-feeding (he could go on) jerks he narrowly escaped working for. 

They walk into the Landman and Zack building and one look at the high ceilings and shiny chrome of the lobby tells him that he made the right decision, in the end; Karen seems inclined to agree. He wishes Karen wasn’t there, almost, that he could have had a chance to talk with Marci alone, maybe smooth things over, maybe ask her why having an office was better than having a soul—but Karen _is_ there, and Marci had made it _very_ clear, by the end, that her patience for coffee dates had long since run out. So, no chance of working that out. Which is fine, because time at the prestigious law firm had clearly turned Marci into something of a terrible person. Foggy doesn’t claim to know her deal, secretly hopes that there’s at least something of the woman he’d known underneath her freshly-painted coat of “asshole”, but _damn_ she is _terrible_. He tears her apart with only a slight twinge of guilt, throwing her case back in her face in the kind of conversation that can only really occur between two lawyers, between two people who each know the law and each know how to make it point their way if you squint just right. Marci even looks kind of impressed by the end of the exchange, and so does Karen.

Later, he’s fixing Mrs. Cardenas’ plumbing. Which is fun and challenging in a tangible, physical kind of way that legal practice isn’t—so Foggy’s enjoying himself, enjoying the rush of success that accompanies the similar rush of water out of Mrs. Cardenas’ pipes, everything’s great, Karen’s impressed with him again (the second time that day, which is awesome and makes Foggy feel way more capable than he actually is), and then, well, and then he turns around to see Mrs. Cardenas brandishing a bowl of some kind of food and the bottom drops out of his stomach. In all honesty, he should have expected this: he has always been acutely aware of elderly women’s instinct to push food on young people at every opportunity, some kind of urge that might be residual from the Great Depression but also might just be genetic programming. He _hates_ this instinct. He hates the whole _world_ in that second, in his “No, Mrs. Cardenas—” 

“— _No,_ you stay.” 

It sounds like a threat. He feels slightly dizzy and slightly sweaty but he can’t say no to her, to Karen, he can’t make a _scene_. He can hardly hear himself speak over the tattoo of his pulse in his ears (he knows he looks totally normal, knows this from long practice) as he asks Karen, “You wanna eat?” and her answer chills him to the bone, makes him think that maybe Matt never actually did cover for him over the lasagna thing.

“It would be rude not to.”

She _knows_. Karen knows exactly what she’s saying, she knows it and she’s, what, she’s _testing_ him or something and he doesn’t know why except maybe because Karen likes to take things as far as they will go, as far as they _can_ go, Karen likes to push and push until something shatters. He thinks about her and that flash drive on Union Allied, he thinks about how a very real threat to her life did not, has still not deterred her. He walks to the table by the window, sits, keeps his posture very purposefully casual. His mouth is dry. He can’t remember the excuse he gave for the lasagna, whether he’d said he was a vegetarian or lactose intolerant or that he keeps kosher—he hasn’t stepped foot in a synagogue since his Bar Mitzvah, but he uses that excuse sometimes—and he’s cursing himself for it even as he grins to Karen and asks if this is a date. His first proper date. The kind of date Marci always wanted from him, and here he’s been forced into it with someone he doesn’t even really _know_.

He makes light conversation, putting food on his plate and not touching it, the smell alone enough to make bile rise in his throat. Karen, ever polite, makes no comment, seems entertained by Foggy’s stories of law school and of Matt and of anything he can possibly think of, anything to remain speaking. She wants to hear about Matt, actually, seems interested in the guy’s love life and how he “sees” and _whoa_ that’s kind of weird and really inappropriate but hey, if it means Foggy doesn’t have to eat he will go right along with the closed eyes and the face touching and—

He will hate himself for this, but the first thing he feels after the explosion is _relief_.

 

(Author's Note: I tried to mess with canon as little as possible, but some messing was inevitable. Also, Jewish Foggy! I'm Jewish, and after that line about misspelling Hannukah in Nelson v. Murdock I thought it would be fun to headcanon Foggy as Jewish too, if only in his childhood. I'm sorry for the delay and I'm sorry to forsee another one--this is finals week for me! Come Thursday, though, I am home free.)


End file.
